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Brian Thomas Smith for QuestDB

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QuestDB raises $12M Series A as the adoption of its time series database grows

To continue development on QuestDB, the open source database for time series, we have raised a $12 million Series A investment led by 468 Capital, with participation from Uncorrelated Ventures and more than 15 enterprise open source founders and executives to grow the team, increase product development and accelerate adoption. In tandem with the funding round, Florian Leibert, co-founder of Mesosphere, joined QuestDB’s board of directors.

Funded by leaders in open source

The backing comes from innovators such as Tom Preston-Werner, GitHub co-founder, Sebastien Pahl, Docker co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, Reddit co-founder, Mirko Novakovic, Instana co-founder, Andrey Alekseev, NGINX co-founder and Tobi Knaup, D2iQ CEO, as well as Michael Li, VP Data at Coinbase and Grace Francisco, VP Developer Relations Strategy at Cisco.

The round of funding was also made possible with participation from Sumedh Pathak, Citus Data co-founder, James Hawkins, PostHog CEO, Paul Copplestone, Supabase CEO, and Dan Pinto, FingerprintJS CEO. QuestDB is now supported by investors who bring years of collective experience in open source and enterprise software domains and have invested personally in the expansion and success of the company at a phase of rapid growth.

The infusion of funds will support continued growth and drive product innovation, building up support and success functions to meet expanding user demand. These resources will enable us to continue powering high-performance applications that rely on robust, easy-to-use analytics. This round also allows the engineering team behind QuestDB to develop new features for a cloud-native database and launch a DBaaS platform that offers fully managed time series database solutions.

The fastest open source time series database

Developers rely on QuestDB for time series insights and real-time applications in FinTech, DevOps monitoring, asset tracking, Big Data, machine learning engines, digital factories, geospatial analysis, autonomous vehicles, and a growing list of use cases that depend on high-performance ingestion and queries over massive data sets in real-time. Collecting data quickly and efficiently allows for the storage of vast amounts of information without wasting compute resources; making sense of the collected data is a different challenge.

QuestDB allows developers to use SQL as a query language to answer questions about how their data looks without the barrier of entry that comes with proprietary query languages. Analyzing historical aspects of data allows users to understand changes over time, identify patterns, and make better decisions on future trends. The engineering team behind QuestDB has built a system that's easier to use and more powerful than open source alternatives by providing support for SQL, faster queries through massively parallelized execution via SIMD, and ingestion speeds that reach millions of rows per second.

Driven by product-led growth

The QuestDB team is dedicated to improving product functionality and enhancements, and regularly delivers features and stability improvements. In the last six months alone, the engineering team has delivered geospatial data support, out-of-order data ingestion, new SQL extensions and accelerators for working with time series data and time zones, along with AWS Marketplace offerings and DigitalOcean applications for flexible deployments. These features empower users to work with complex data sets, including spatial data and allow developers to quickly and easily build time series applications where their infrastructure operates.

Since QuestDB launched at Y Combinator one year ago, the company has been embraced by developers looking for high-ingestion and query speeds, and an open source alternative to proprietary solutions. Engineers continue to support QuestDB, which now consists of a community of more than 10,000 developers and is reflected in the DB-Engines ranking, which shows a 187% increase in popularity over the last 12 months. The adoption of QuestDB continues to expand with unique deployed instances growing 20% per month, and powering the infrastructure of industry leaders such as Airbus and Yahoo. The success of this funding round increases the company's valuation 10 times versus seed a year ago and will invigorate product and community development in preparation for upcoming launches.

What users say about QuestDB

  • "QuestDB is used at Airbus for real-time applications involving hundreds of millions of data points per day. For us, QuestDB is an outstanding solution that meets (and exceeds) our performance requirements." - Oliver Pfeiffer, Software Architect, Airbus

  • "We use QuestDB to monitor metrics for autoscaling decisions within our ML engine that provides search, recommendation, and personalization via models and aggregations on continuously changing data." - Jon Bratseth, VP Architect, Yahoo

  • "When we set out to design the next generation of our execution platform, one of our requirements was large-scale model calibration based on real-time market data streams. QuestDB allows us to derive quick insights on live and historical data that would not be achievable with other open source time series databases." - Jean-François Perreton, Head of Algo Quant, Kepler Cheuvreux

About QuestDB

QuestDB is an open source high-performance time series database built from the ground up to offer breakthrough performance for real-time analytics using SQL. The team behind QuestDB brings decades of experience and technical approaches from low-latency applications to leverage real-time data processing. QuestDB is a remote-first company and is backed by leading venture capital firms and Y Combinator. For more information, visit questdb.io, QuestDB on GitHub, or follow @QuestDB.

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